What on earth are Google thinking? (re: Binggate)
puremango.co.uk
puremango.co.uk
I think he forgot option 5: whether Bing intentionally copied Google's search results or not, if Bing continues this practice then their index will contain a de facto copy of Google's index for tricky queries. Bing will inherit Google's spelling correction, it's long tail, its top results, and any other enhancements Google develops to return more relevant results.
Google invests so much into these things; if Bing absorbs these improvements without lifting a finger, Google loses its ability to stay ahead through technical merit and innovation.
I think Amit is telling the truth: "And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...
Bing and it's boosters have been touting their search engine results as better and more relevant than Google's. As it turns out, the reason for that, is because they are tracking all of Google's results without reporting that they are doing so.
Additionally, the article posted here is disingenuous. There is a difference between tracking general click tracking, and what bing is doing, which is scraping queries and click results. That is not a general browsing feature, this is a search engine specific feature, designed to benefit off of the results provided by others.
Was it just the top result that was copied or were more of the results copied as well?
The key question is whether they have special rules in place for google. I am indeed presuming that if i were using the same tools google did on my personal website, i would not achieve the same result.
Bing probably has a ranking algorithm saying that links from google.com search pages have x weight and links from facebook profiles are valued at some other value etc.
They are also susceptible to Google "poisoning" the well, by creating a bot-net to provide fake data to Bing.
It would be interesting to see where the law comes down on tracking clicks for a competitive advantage. I doubt anything will get past handbags at dawn, as it could draw attention to click tracking on ads, and no-one want that.
And if Google had waited for Bing to reply privately before making any of this public, I'm sure we'd have avoided all this drama.
Apparently Google only cares about sites copying other sites content when their it's their own stuff getting copied.
edit: 'they' here refers to the old media newspapers, more specifically to Mr. Murdoch.
And Google doesn't let creators opt-out of just the content-stealing part of their scheme. If you want to be indexed by Google, you have to allow them to copy whatever they want from your site. And no one can actually opt-out because Google is a monopoly in search. So they get away with it, stealing pageviews from content creators.
Using search trails is a near-standard practice--to guess intent, find deep links, yada yada. Does Google want Bing to special-case links going out from their site? Or all search-engines maybe? What about techniques like this? http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p66.pdf
The paper authors sure call it innovative, not cheating :) (Also, techniques like this search+wrapper are great for Product Search, and I'd be surprised if Google doesn't use them).
I think Google's stance is rather unfair. While Bing may have "copied" results, I feel this was just a side-effect of trying to build a good index, rather than a case of "oooh.... let's see what's google returns for this, and just copy the result").
They're either parsing the query out of the url, or violating robots.txt to fetch the result page, almost certainly the former. This seems like a pretty clear indication that they've special-cased clicks from google. It's theoretically plausible that they are treating all query parameters the same for all sites, but very unlikely given how much noise that would introduce into their results. Even so, they would have to know that most clicks with meaningful query parameters come from Google. This isn't something that's going to happen by accident.
Or parsing any words found in the URL. Not unreasonable to believe.
I'm not 100% sure this is the case.
Consider that an user wants a chicken enchilada recipe.
1. They go to a site that they trust for high quality data. (I like food&wine, saveur, epicurious, rick bayless for mexican, ...) 2. They search for "chicken enchilada" 3. They select the most appealing result (not necessarily the first one), based on author, snippet, rating, photo, etc. Domain knowledge.
If you can associate (via the referrer) "chicken enchilada" with that page, you've encapsulated a lot of information - manual selection of site, manual selection of a page within that site. It's potentially useful (especially for long tail - people who have to go directly to sites because search engines fail them).
Is there too much noise? Perhaps - you'd really have to look at the raw data to find out. Maybe you only want to look at "q=", "search=", and whatever phpBB, etc use. Maybe the signal that rises out of that noise is valuable.
One big downside is that the results would be biased towards the preferences of people who install toolbars. :) The other downside is that SEOs could game the system by feeding MS bad data. (True if they're only looking at google data, too.)
More likely, though, it's a play to get Microsoft to come out and say more about what they track and how.
What seems far more likely is bing is using click tracking on G's results. This was explicitly not denied by their VP on the search engine panel today. If not many sites except search engines have useful keywords in the query string, that pretty much validates Google's complaint.
In fact, if you go to Google's blogpost [1], the bing toolbar specifically calls out monitoring "the searches you do, the websites you visit, [...]" [1]. And the MS guy doesn't deny using clicks on G's search results [2]. In fact, the pretty much just says they copy G on long tail searches.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...
[2] http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...
Well, Google is one such site - as in, if you have bing toolbar installed and are on google.com/search?q=keyword and click on example.com, then Bing can easily extract "google com search q keyword" and associate it with example.com - without anything explicitly or intentionally relating to Google in their code.
They may also be looking at referrer info.
Any site which has a search engine of its own is going to have keywords in the query string such as: http://www.reddit.com/search?q=blah
Being as charitable as possible here, I'm willing to believe that some well-meaning engineer coded this up without special casing google. Tested it out, found that it worked amazingly well, and then launched it. This seems unlikely, but possible.
However, somewhere along the line someone must have known that the biggest benefit of this signal was recreating Google results. I'm not willing to believe that no one figured this out even if it wasn't the initial intent. At which point there's an ethical dilemma. At Google, a system like this wouldn't launch.
Regardless of the mechanism, I don't believe that nobody at bing knows that this is what was going on. Maybe it's a cynical attempt to get around robots.txt. Maybe it's an honest mistake that gradually became a dishonest mistake, but I'm not willing to believe that they are oblivious.
Google is unavoidably a giant signal-source on the web. Even if Microsoft instead sent unique keywords to contract writers to build out findable summary/directory web pages one-by-one, what would those writers do? Research via other search engines, starting with Google, and be heavily influenced by the few (or top) results they found, highlighting the same sites. So your results would still percolate outward, via a slower, more expensive, more manual process. (Would that process, laundered through time and multiple agents, meet your ethical standards?)
Such is the nature of Google's position today. As Rich Skrenta of Blekko has put it: "The net isn't a directed graph. It's not a tree. It's a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages."
A little of Google's proprietary wisdom is leaking back out. The amount seems small compared to all the freely-offered info Google sucked in to create that wisdom. And, the proprietary wisdom is leaking back out via the same sort of bulk, automated mining of implicitly expressed preferences that for which Google itself is famous. So to me this seems more like karmic balance than an ethical transgression against Google.
What I do know is that the original suspicious result for "torsoraphy" is returned by Wikimedia's search algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=torsoraph...
Imagine I am the Bing toolbar and I am spying on my users.
The Google search result for fake word zxczxczxczxczx is then a web page with a single link, and the user I am observing is clicking that link. So I am Bing, and I make a connection: zxczxczxczxczx (which appears on this web page) is related to said link.
Since the word is artificial and doesn't appear anywhere else, it's eventually going to produce that page as a search result.
So I think the author is right - what Google has done is they have proven that Bing toolbar tracks what users are doing, and sends the results back to Bing to improve their search.
They have not proven that Bing treats google.com differently from any other page. For that they should have seeded 100 random web pages from different domains with artificial words, and have these pages contain a link which the user with Bing toolbar installed then clicks. I bet that it would yield the same result as the Google test, e.g. those fake words would get matched to the linked web pages.
But is Bing "parsing the url" any different to what Google's doing when I go into Google Analytics -> Traffic Sources -> Search Engines, and select Keyword in the second dropdown (after source)? Google are clearly showing me the search terms parsed out of the referrer urls from people who found my site in Bing.
I think this is perhaps not obvious behaviour to the general public, but surely pretty much anyone who goes to the trouble of installing the Bing (or Google) toolbar has worked out for themselves that they're choosing to send data like this to Microsoft (and Google), and that it'll get used to "improve search" if it's found to be useful for that?
1. URL: "test - Google"
Title: http://www.google.com/search?q=test
2. URL: http://test.org.us
Title: "Test"
Referrer: http://www.google.com/search?q=test
Time: 2 secs
2. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_cricket
Title: "Test cricket - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"
Referrer: http://www.google.com/search?q=test
Time: 249 secs
Changing from POST to GET in IE8 would stop Microsoft from mining data in the short term, but would drastically decrease the UX of Google for a large portion of its users who could very easily switch to Bing.
Where's your evidence for any of that?
There's another way. Store the input of any Text Box which is immediately followed by a form submit,(search term), and then store the href of the subsequent click (the result which the user finds helpful).
The above is a way of handling it (naive and abstract) which doesn't target Google, and in fact would work for insite searches as well, or any search engine.
Since you've already made up your mind that your two ways were the only way of doing things, what's your opinion given the above?
Exactly. It's not "click data" at all. It is monitoring user behavior on search engines, using both the clicks and the queries. Maybe it's not monitoring just Google as a search engine (although we have no proof of that yet: it seems it's just watching Google) but given Google's market share in search it doesn't make much difference.
From the article:
> I don’t even work in search and I could spot the real situation
This sentence is at the same time arrogant and funny. He doesn't work in search, but he's certain he's spotted "the real situation". How did he fact check it, besides asking himself if he was correct and answering "yes, obviously I'm right. I'm always right -- and I don't even know anything! I amaze myself."
By reading the official MS blog post[1], watching the Farsight conference live, and being confident in my own judgements based on the observed evidence. No other conclusion is supported by the evidence - you say "It is monitoring user behavior on search engines" - where's the evidence that it's exclusively search engines they're monitoring? Let alone exclusively Google? There has been no evidence yet presented. Therefore all we can conclude from Google's sting is that Bing use URL/click data. Which is exactly what I said in the original thread[2], in my blog post, and lo and behold it's what MS later said. That's how I know it's the real situation.
[1] like where Harry says "A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in ... To be clear, we learn from all of our customers".
It's not "click" data, it's the correlation between search term and SERP. That someone visited such and such a page after a click isn't the issue. That someone Googled for a unique term before clicking is at issue.
Grandparent: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2168377
Googling with Bing: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1915736
There are currently exactly two sources: The Google post and the MS post. Who are more likely to know about what MS are doing? MS. I check my theory about what MS are doing with the source most likely to contain correct information.
> It's not "click" data
It's 'clickstream' data (MS's term). A 'click' comes from a page and goes to a page. That's the data MS were capturing. The page the click happened on (query happens to be included in URL), and the page the click went to. It's click data.
However, agreed -- clickstream means series of clicks, and the actual data is a series of URLs.
The query "happening" to be in the URL has no "search > result" meaning without a parser being told to look for Google's particular keyword query indicators and correlate the subsequent page. As most URLs are not searches, this is not emergent behavior; it's programmed.
People also talk about this being a "weak" signal, but given search volume (or clickstream volume if you prefer) on Google versus other sources, even if this code is generic (e.g., recognize all "q=blah" or "search=blah" as keywords and correlate the following URL), it seems the signal would be strong indeed. Google's weak signal would provide several times more correlative data to Bing than Bing's own clicks.
Not that there's anything wrong with that! But Bing's blog assertions feel disingenuous -- they play this game well:
We can't apply skepticism to one source and not the other. Either Google and Bing are not blogging with self-interest and spin - and thus Bing are more trustworthy because they're blogging about themselves, or they both are blogging with self-interest and spin - and still Bing are more trustworthy because they're blogging about themselves.
You just can't legitimately discount what Bing say because of self-interest and spin without also discounting what Google say for the same reasons.
> The query "happening" to be in the URL has no "search > result" meaning without a parser being told to look for Google's particular keyword query indicators and correlate the subsequent page.
No. remove non-alpha from entire URL with no preconception about search queries or any of that. You're left with "google com search q QUERYTERM". All the words apart from QUERYTERM has plenty of other signals in Bing's system. If QUERYTERM is a highly unusual word then all Bing have to go on is the data they gleaned from Google.
Libel laws prohibit indiscriminate accusation, while there's no law against puffery.
The premise a company's own public relations messaging is more trustworthy than an outsider because the company's PR is about themselves seems without merit -- otherwise we would deem companies more trustworthy whenever an outsider points fingers, and send all the journalists, whistleblowers, and wiki-leakers home. "Nope, sorry, I believe the company, because they're talking about themselves."
Google presented incontrovertible data. Bing's PR tactic is "Google does this or that worse thing and profits off it" -- distracting hand waving -- "plus we're not copying anyway" -- deliberately disingenuous.
Responsive would be:
Of course our toolbar is recognizing search terms across the top N search sites, and correlating human selected results as an indicator of search intent and result quality for those search terms. This is the same thing you do when you look at your own web stats and check inbound search terms for your own pages: 'How relevant are my pages, and am I showing my users what they are looking for?'
This is the very definition of 'improving your search experience' as outlined when you install our toolbar. We're thrilled so many of you chose our Internet Explorer browser and Bing Toolbar that this provides us meaningful data on user search intent. We want to thank Google for demonstrating we are truly 'improving your search experience' using well accepted Internet crowd-sourcing techniques.
We agree, however, that generating correlations solely from competitor listings -- when we have no existing correlation in our own data corpus -- could be misperceived, so going forward, we will not create correlations solely from competitor results where none existed in our data. However, like every webmaster, we will continue to use crowd-sourced search term and results data from across the web to refine our suggestion order towards best predicting the information you want to find.
> The premise a company's own public relations messaging is more trustworthy than an outsider because the company's PR is about themselves seems without merit
That sounds right. Hmm, fair point.
The evidence that has been presented by Google does show that MS is monitoring Google's search results, or at the very least users' behavior when using Google.
I agree that there's no evidence that Google is the only search engine that's being monitored, but it makes little difference since for all practical purposes Google == search.
There's also no evidence that MS monitors other websites / behavior other than just search engines, but it's unclear how that would work? You can't just associate two websites because some users go from one to the other (correlation vs. causation, etc.)
- - -
At this point we're still in the "he said / she said" phase, but Google has more evidence and MS is coming out as incredibly defensive (e.g., raising an inquiry from the European Commission[1]: what does that have to do with anything!!?!)
I said "exclusively".
> there's no evidence that Google is the only search engine that's being monitored
There's no evidence that it's only search engines.
> You can't just associate two websites because some users go from one to the other
sure you can, if they go via a link. Now you can just notice the link and say "great, there's an association", or you can monitor which links people click on and weight the graph accordingly. "great, there's an association, and this link is more popular than that one". Nice data to capture. Not constrained to search.
Honestly, if Bing isn't giving Google special treatment, this whole debacle shows that their click tracking model works.
So Microsoft takes their search results - it's all in the game! And Google wrote the rules!
It’s like if Developer A takes Developer B's code and passes it off as his own work without any citation. Does it matter if it was malicious or incidental? Not really, it's still wrong. And if Developer A gets caught doing it, he should own up to his mistake and fix it.
The boundary just seems arbitrary to me, which makes the whole thing seem hypocritical.
Why not?
I haven't been able to influence the Bing search results (no surprise there, since I've only spent a few minutes on it and not weeks like the Google folks) but one thing I did find very interesting was that if you search for something on another site, the Bing bar actually lights up and populates its own search field with your query so that with another click you can search for it on Bing.
As far as I can tell, the bar doesn't seem to be using any heuristic to tell what is a search query but just has a list of sites/URL patterns it knows about. Besides Google and Bing itself, these include Wikipedia, Yahoo, Ask.com, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, MSDN and IMDB, but not Twitter or DuckDuckGo. This doesn't prove anything about how it's feeding search results of course but it does at least suggest that the Bing bar is very interested specifically in search queries, though not only on Google.
If I search twitter for "binggate" then click on a link, the referrer would be:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Binggate
It wouldn't be hard to write a generic parser to detect URLs that look like search queries, and it'd be a novel way to gain a lot of information from private indexes (stack overflow, twitter, lucene/solr setups, reddit, etc).
If this is what Bing is doing, then kudos to them for clever thinking, no foul play.
However, if the toolbar has any logic to specifically parse Google's URL syntax, or if they're filtering and correlating google.com URLs against their own algorithms, then it's copying and foul play.
The surprising thing here is how much publicity Google's giving the issue knowing that Microsoft could shoot them down in no time with a few code snippets (if there's no foul play going on).
vs
>However, if the toolbar has any logic to specifically parse Google's URL syntax
So they're either generically copying from ANY search engine, or they're specifically copying from Google. Either way, the perception and actual outcome is the same. I'm not sure either is inherently good or bad, but I'm surprised that there is such a delineation in peoples' minds.
Take a site-specific search index like the one that reddit uses. Such an index can prioritize by votes, comments, users, fine-tuned spam filters, and so on. A search engine specifically optimized for reddit has a lot more information available when returning links than a generic web crawler ever could.
If Bing came up with a generic way to leverage site-specific search engines and help drive traffic to those sites, is that still perceived with negative connotations?
Pages in a robots.txt file still get put into Google's index they just don't get parsed. Surprised me to find that out; http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt (see "Why Meta Robots is better than robots.txt").
Not everything needs a pithy one-word term of endearment.
Oh wait, that's still one word.
The comments on this subject seem very polarised and it is interesting to look at the background of the commenters.
My charter back in 2006-7 was "game-changing strategies", which meant getting people to think outside the bubble. So we did a lot of work analyzing Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's corporate culture. One of the things that's core to Google's identity is preferring algorithms to anything that has to do with people, and that's very much on display with Binggate.
From what they've said, it seems like they only tested against fake clicks on google.com. That tells us Bing are using click data but nothing more. This is a pretty simple debugging technique, which is why I'm shocked if Google didn't think to do that. I really wish I wasn't the one saying this, wish I didn't have these doubts. But I can come to no other conclusion than the ones I've outlined in the post.
I guess my point is, unless you have deep knowledge into the secret workings of a search engine with hundreds of inputs, simple "tests" to figure out the nature of just one of those inputs are bound to end in multiple plausible explanations for your results, unless you rig a huge fraction of the WWW. And Google has better things to do with their time.
0. There might or might not have been a control group, but its results didn't matter since:
0a) the whole purpose of revealing this was to make sure that blackhat SEOs could start abusing the system, and MS would thus be forced to stop doing it.
0b) the whole purpose of revealing this was to shame MS into stopping the practice, and for that purpose it didn't matter whether the system was specific or generic.
0c) describing the full experimental setup and the gazillion things that were tested would just have distracted from the core story
1. There was a control group and it suggested that the mechanism wasn't generic, it just wasn't mentioned because:
1a) it was held back as a gotcha in case Microsoft started lying about what the system actually did.
1b) positive evidence from the control group couldn't actually prove anything, it'd be suggestive at best.
2. There was no need for an explicit control group since:
2a) they actually observed the network traffic of the toolbar, and it only sent the relevant information for Google and not other sites.
2b) they disassembled the toolbar and found out it had Google-specific code related to this.
3. There was a control group and it suggested that the mechanism was generic, but:
3a) they thought that the the mechanism being generic didn't matter, and what MS were doing was still equally dodgy.
3b) they thought that MS would not be keen on trying out a "oh no, it's not just Google whose algorithms we're leeching off when spying on users, it's every other site too" PR strategy.
I have no idea of what actually happened. In all likelihood it was something not listed here, since these were just random ideas. But at least I think many of them are way more plausible than the silly "maverick super-senior engineers botch the job, leak a flawed story, PR coverup follows" theory.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fd3g9/google_bi...
Apparently by creating fake results they've published something "creative" and thus potentially able to be copywrited. Just speculation but interesting.
In reality adding a fake "fact" to a collection of real facts does not allow you to sue someone if they copy the fake fact along with the real facts; from the decision in Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., treating "'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright ... If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated"
Re the decision you cite it seems to be spurious. The notion of whether the data is factual or not is irrelevant. Was the presentation copied?
>would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact
Unless they actual did some work and checked the facts rather than making a slavish, infringing, copy of someone else's work.
>If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated"
For limited terms of never (not limited enough mind you but nonetheless limited).
This is interesting though - if you can copy facts with impunity then can't I copy the "fact" of the score for Katy Perry's Firework for example?
And then given Bing explicit permission to copy it by accepting the terms and conditions of the Bing toolbar while installing it.
If you repeat the experiment with 2 made up results instead of just one but clicked on only the 2nd one, only the 2nd one would show up and not the first. They are copying the user action(for which they got permission), not the results directly.
It's not scraping, it's click tracking.
Darn, now it's really tempting to fire up some VMs. I don't have time for that.
Let's say Microsoft via its bing-toolbar is checking what pages people are visiting, what search term they are using on various sites (including google) and what they deem are the most useful results of these queries, and incorporating this into their search engine. Is this really so bad?
As it stands, Google is collecting this data about you almost everywhere on the internet, even if you use google or not. Besides straight Google search, think websites which uses Google's CDN for stuff like jQuery, Google analytics, etc etc. Google is everywhere and they are collecting data to incorporate in their search and ad-platform from everyone. End of story.
Heck, with google instant and their new JS-based search-gui you can't even get the referer information on your own website to see what search terms lead your users to your site. You now have to use Google analytics to get that information, and in getting that information you are helping Google even further in tracking everything everyone is doing on the internet. WTH?
Relatively speaking, is really Microsoft the bad guy here?